Friday January 16, 2026
Science —
Chronic exposure to pesticides and other pollutants can devastate wildlife populations—sometimes in dramatically obvious ways. By thinning birds’ eggshells, for example, DDT caused brooding bald eagles to crush their unhatched offspring. But more often, the exact cause of harm remains a mystery. Now, a study finds that a widely used insecticide, chlorpyrifos, speeds up aging in a common lake fish by shortening the protective caps on its chromosomes, and leads to its premature death.
The study, published this week in Science, is “particularly impressive because of its wealth of data,” says Heinz Köhler, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Tübingen who was not involved in the new research. Other work has found evidence of chronic harm from pesticides, but “what makes this article special,” he says, “is its causal and mechanistic explanation of a shortened life span,” based on markers of cellular aging.